Jesus said that the would make his disciples, “Fishers of men.” The late Dr. Clovis Chappell was at one time pastor of the 1st Methodist Church on Tryon Street in Charlotte, N.C. Dr. Chappell once wrote that we preachers ought to preach just the way that an experienced quail hunter shoots birds.
He put it something like this:
An experienced hunter never just shoots into the rising covey, for he knows from experience that will nearly always result in a miss. An experienced hunter always picks out a single bird, and aims at that bird, and downs that bird before looking for another. Likewise, a preacher ought not to aim his sermon at the whole congregation, for that will almost always result in a miss, but he (or she) must aim his sermon at a single segment of that congregation. That often results in a hit.
I am not sure this piece of advice is always appropriate, but there are certainly times when it is, and I think this may be one of them. So, this morning I am aiming this sermon, not at the congregation as a whole, but at a single segment of it. I am aiming this sermon at the “wistful thinkers” among us. Of course, there are a variety of wistful thinkers.
The first variety of wistful thinker is the Common Variety, and they are plentiful.
They can be identified by a propensity to clump together in churches. If you watch them carefully, and listen, from time to time you can hear them as they breathe deeply and sigh. If they communicate further, it is often in the past tense. They are o.k. There is nothing wrong with them. They are just thinking about the people whom they have loved in this life, and lost.
They are living as God intended we should. The Bible never says that we should not grieve. It says that we should not grieve “as those who have no hope.” (1st Thessalonians 4:13)
I shall never forget my first true encounter with a common variety wistful thinker. I had accepted a call to a older congregation that was losing members through the simple process of attrition. I was thirty years old and full of beans, not yet dry behind the ears. By contrast, the age of a member in that congregation was somewhere between sixty and eighty. I was not deterred. On my second or third Sunday there, I dared to stand up in front of that congregation and tell them that I was absolutely, positively convinced that the Golden Age of the congregation was still in the future.
A few days after I preached that sermon, a woman who would ultimately become a very good friend to me and my family came to see me in my study. She said, “Preacher, I just want you to know that I appreciate your youth, and enthusiasm, and obvious ability. I want you to know that I believe that, for you, the Golden Age of this congregation is still out there in the future. I just want to make sure you know how it is with me. There was a time I sat on a pew in our sanctuary with twelve members of my family, including my mamma and my daddy, and my husband, and my son, and eight brothers and sisters, and their husbands and wives. Now there is just me, and one sister, and my son visits from time to time.”
I am older now, and hopefully a little wiser. I am an only child. I still have my family around me. I don’t know how that woman felt, but I do know that she felt more than I want to know. What I do know is hard enough.
I look out this morning and I see a great congregation, one of the largest of our year. You are dressed in finery from head to toe. You are beautiful, and I love you individually and collectively. However, like many of you, I see another congregation, one that occupied this space in former times, and I miss them. When we go out into the Graveyard for the Resurrection Service, many of you will stand by the graves of people you have loved and lost. I just want you to know that I will be remembering them with you. Many of us will. In some measure all of us belong to this common variety of Wistful Thinker.
Easter Sunday is for us, all of us. It is filled with hope and promise that we have not seen the last of those we love. By faith we believe that the tomb in which they put Jesus the Messiah was not his final resting place, but just a room for a transient. By faith we believe that on the third day he rose again from the dead, transformed into a whole new order of being. By faith we believe that his resurrection is the signpost that points to our own, and to that of those we have loved, who have gone before us into his presence. By faith we believe that God has not abandoned us in our little world of time and space, but, in the person of his Son, penetrated it, shattered it, and begun its transformation.
This morning I am also aiming this sermon at the Hard-Shelled, Long-Beaked, Dyed-in-the-Down Wistful Thinker.
You know who you are.
These are they who know themselves to be star-crossed lovers. These are they who know the pain of always finishing second. These are they who know that opportunity knocks only once. These are they who have passed their lives on the shadow side of the street, watching as others walk in the sun.
This variety of wistful thinker has a distinctive cry. Let me see if I can reproduce it for you: “Itmighthavebeen.” “Itmighthavebeen.” “Itmighthavebeen.”
The 19th century poet John Greenleaf Whittier was the first to isolate this plaintive cry. It was he who wrote:
Of all the sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these, “It might have been.
If you are a Hard-Shelled, Long-Beaked Wistful Thinker, I have a word of comfort for you. While it is true that opportunity sometimes knocks only once, life is filled with multiple opportunities. Opportunities are like buses. They come along one after another. They don’t always arrive when we want them to, but they do arrive. The trick is to be waiting for them when they come. The surest way to miss a bus is to wait too long in the wrong place. The surest way to miss an opportunity is to be stuck in the past. According to Genesis 19, when Lot and his family were fleeing Sodom, his wife looked back to the city, and remembered the life she once enjoyed there, and turned into a pillar of salt. Some people are so hung up in defending the literal nature of the story that they miss its meaning for their own lives. We can’t live in the past. We can’t make a life on regrets. Life is what it is, and sooner or later, we have got to move with it. St. Paul gave the best advice for those who are stuck in the past. He wrote:
Forgetting what lies behind, and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, or the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
There is another variety of wistful thinker I am aiming at. This is the Newly hatched, I Can’t believe I Have Become One, Wistful Thinker.
They make a variety of sounds. Some say, “Why me?” Others say, “Why not me?” Most have been known to pray frequently.
Some have become what they are because of some difficulty, perhaps an illness, or a major disappointment of some kind. In this economy, there are lots of these. President Obama says that he sees glimmers of hope in the economy. That’s great, but if you are one of these, unless you can see the glow of the glimmer in your own life, that doesn’t mean much. You are more concerned with microeconomics that with macroeconomics.
I cannot imagine how hard it is to loose a job. I know it is not just about the job, and it would not be with me. Like most American men, I identify myself with my job. My job tells me who I am. If I meet somebody, the first thing I want him or her to know is not that I am Worth Green, but that I am Worth Green, the pastor of New Philadelphia Moravian Church.
I just returned from a trip to the Southwest where I met several Navajos. I was told that they have a different value system. They don’t say, “My name is, and I am a….” They say, “My name is, and my mother’s people are the Such and Such Clan, and my father’s people are the So and So Clan, etc.”
The Navajo have it right. In most cases a man or a woman is more than what we do. Who tells us who we are? Is it the name of the paycheck we get or don’t get? No. The members our family who tell us who we are. Our friends who tell us who we are. Our character tells us who we are. And our faith tells that us we are o.k. and that we are going to be o.k.
This is Easter Day. Easter is all about God doing what could not be done. It is about God reaching down into the grave of the Crucified Son, and lifting him out, into the light of the third day, into the light of the ages, into the light of eternity. And that light still shines, on us, and on you.
The late James S. Stewart once wrote that the central business of preaching today (and everyday) is telling men and women that the same power that took Jesus Christ out of the grave is available to them right now, not just in the moment of death, but in the midst of our life.
In the days of his flesh, Jesus spoke to his disciples saying, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” The last words of the risen Christ to his disciples on that mountain top in Galilee were these, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age.”
A man passing through a difficult time once said to me, that Jesus might just as easily have said, “Low, L, O, W, I am with you always, because the lower I get, the more real he becomes.”
God honors free men who respond in freedom to God, and there is no limit to what a free people can accomplish when we set our minds to a problem. There will be a tomorrow! We have not seen the dawn of the last cloudy day after which we will never again see the sun.
There is one more variety of Wistful Thinkers I am aiming at this morning, the Camouflaged Wistful Thinker.
They are not hard to see. They are everywhere. You see them in their homes, and on the street. You see them at the office, and at the mall. You even see them in Church. You see them, but, you don’t’ see their true colors, unless they decide to reveal them to you.
These are they who have lost, or feel like they are loosing their faith, and they think wistfully about those days when faith was as certain as sunrise, and as comforting the promise of spring on an Easter Day.
Not long ago, a man came to me and asked me how he could regain a faith he had lost.
This was my answer to him. It is the same answer Peter Boehler, a Moravian layman, once gave to John Wesley, the English preacher who founded of the worldwide Methodist Movement. Wesley told Boehler that he was not sure of his faith in Jesus Christ, and that he thought he should probably give up preaching. Boehler said, “No! Don’t you do that, John Wesley. You just keep preaching faith until you have it, and then, because you have it, you will preach faith!”
That is pretty good advice. If you are a preacher, when you hit a dry spot, just keep preaching faith until you have it, and then, because you have it, you will preach faith. And if you are a human being, whether a preacher, or a doctor, or a plumber, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or an Indians chief, just live faith until you have it, and then, because you have it your will live faith.
Some will ask, “How?” That is the cry of the wistful thinker that I am aiming at this morning, “How?” “How do you live faith as if you have it?”
I gave him the standard answers. Come to church. Associate with people of faith. Pray, and learn to put feet on your prayers, for no prayer is genuine if we are not willing to be a part of the answer. Read the Bible. I told him that he would find some of it difficult and hard to understand, but that some of it will lay hold of him, and lead him along. I told him to follow it where it leads. That it would lead him inward, to that place where he cannot hide from himself, and outward, into the world of others. I told him by all means to get involved in the world. I reminded him how Jesus said that he is always present in the person of those who are hungry, thirsty, tired, beaten down, or caught in some prison, sometimes with, and sometimes without bars. I told him that when we reach out to others, Jesus reaches out to us. “He makes him home with us.”
That is what I told him, but this is a sermon, so let me finish it with a story.
It is about a sailor. His ship went down in a terrible storm. He was the only survivor. He managed to pull himself out of the water, and into the ship’s skiff. For a day all was stormy. Then there was clear night. He looked up at the velvet sky and it was resplendent with the constellations. He took a reading, and he set his course, for home.
For the next week or more, the weather was foul, a dense fog lay upon the face of the deep. He could not see the stars. But in faith he continued to steer by the last reading he made, and after a long and arduous time, he arrived safely at home.
And you say, “Worth, that story has a suspiciously happy ending. I have seen the movie. In the movie it does not have a happy ending.”
Of course I have planned a happy ending. When we seek God the ending is a happy ending because God is already seeking us. God is the greatest Wistful Thinker of all. He remembers us, even when we ignore him, and longs for our company, and when at last we turn to him, we find that he is not just waiting, but actively moving toward us, like the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, ready to make us his own.